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NPR affiliate scores major PR with risqué marketing campaign

National Public Radio has rarely—if ever—been associated with the word “risqué.”

That all changes with a new ad campaign from Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ—a campaign that sparked media coverage in a number of major outlets, including The New York Times.

The station’s “2032 Membership Drive” campaign essentially encourages its listeners to—ahem—procreate. The idea is that if its listeners make babies, those babies will be NPR listeners in, you guessed it, 2032.

The campaign features the following tag lines:

• Do it. For Chicago.
• We want listeners tomorrow. Go make babies today.
• Hey Interesting People, get a room already. And then put a crib in it.
• To anyone NOT currently running a virtual farm: GoMakeBabies.com
• You're an interesting person. Pass it on. Like, literally. Through your DNA.

WBEZ is targeting the “Curious Class,” and plans to push their target audience to the site GoMakeBabies.com, a Facebook app where users take an “interesting assessment.”

Daniel Ash, vice president of WBEZ parent company Chicago Public Media, said in a press release: “Certainly it’s a different approach than what one would expect from a public media station but we hope this will reach, and resonate with, younger news consumers who've never heard of us.”

The campaign has certainly resonated with media outlets in the Windy City and elsewhere. On Monday, The New York Times Media Decoder blog covered the new slogans, which unleashed the wave of interest in the campaign.